Proclamation on Threshing Grain, 20 December 1777
Proclamation on Threshing Grain
[Valley Forge, 20 December 1777]
By virtue of the power and direction to me especially given, I hereby enjoin and require all persons residing within Seventy miles of my Head Quarters to thresh one half of their grain by the first day of February and the other half by the first day of March next ensuing, on pain in case of failure of having All that shall remain in Sheaves, after the periods abovementioned, seized by the Commissaries & Quarter Masters of the Army and paid for as Straw.1 Given under my Hand at Head Quarters near the Valley forge in [ ] County, this 20th day of Decemb. Anno Dom. 1777.
Go: Washington
Df, in Robert Hanson Harrison’s writing, DLC:GW; copy, PHarH: Records of Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary Governments, 1775–1790; copy, MiU-C: Germain Papers; Varick transcript, DLC:GW. GW’s aide-de-camp Tench Tilghman on 22 Dec. wrote John Dunlap, who at this time was carrying on his printing business at Lancaster, Pa.: “Be pleased to insert the inclosed proclamation in your next paper and continue it untill the times limited expire. Be pleased also to strike off three hundred Copies upon loose sheets. One hundred of which are to be delivered to the Qr Masr at Lancaster to be distributed among the inhabitants in that quarter and the remainder sent here. If there is a German paper printed in Lancaster be kind enough to have the proclamation printed in that also” (DLC:GW). John Dunlap printed the proclamation both as a broadside and in his Pennsylvania Packet or the General Advertiser on 31 Dec. 1777, 7 and 21 Jan. 1778, and Francis Bailey of Lancaster printed it as a broadside in German.
1. GW acted under the authority granted him by Congress on 10 Dec., the resolution concerning which Henry Laurens had enclosed in his letter to GW of 12 December.